I make Sam go because the youth-group leaders know things that I don’t. They know what teenagers are looking for, and need—they need adults who have stayed alive and vital, adults they wouldn’t mind growing up to be. And they need total acceptance of who they are, from adults they trust, and to be welcomed in whatever condition life has left them—needy, walled off. They want guides, adults who know how to act like adults but with a kid’s heart. They want people who will sit with them and talk about the big questions, even if they don’t have the answers; adults who won’t correct their feelings or pretend not to be afraid. They are looking for adventure, experience, pilgrimages, and thrills. And then they want a home they can return to, where things are stable and welcoming. I mean, how crazy can you get?
Sam told one youth-group leader, Mark, that he knows instinctively that God wants him to have a life. That God would want him to surf and be alive and out having fun on a Sunday morning. That it’s physically painful for him to sit indoors on a Sunday.
“Then why are you here?” Mark asked.
“Because my mother wants me here to share it with her,” Sam said.
“I think that’s a really good reason,” Mark said.
I’ve seen Sam sneak glances at Mark. I know he wants what Mark has—not the faith part, necessarily, but the humor, the great vibe. (“Vibe is everything,” Sam confided to me after a recent youth-group meeting with Mark.)
Most of the kids in the group came over to give me a hug during the Passing of the Peace. I was their Sunday-school teacher before they were teenagers, and they trust me: I helped Sunday school go down more easily for them. I loved them, gave them good snacks, drawing paper. I let them go outside for the Sacrament of the Lawn, to blow bubbles and play catch. Some of them have lost years and siblings to foster care and institutionalization. Some have lost parents to violence and addiction. Many have fallen through the cracks their whole lives—but not here, not on Sundays.
When Sam came over to hug me during the Passing of the Peace, it was like being hugged by the Frankenstein monster, but he let me smell his neck for a moment.
I half listened to the children’s sermon; I thought mostly about the whales in Whale Rider. They’re covered with clusters of barnacles the size of platters, all that stuff that attaches itself to whales because of its need, not the whales’. It’s obviously good for the barnacles—it’s a better ride, and they’re bathed in nourishment, but I can’t see how it might benefit the whales. I started thinking of my mother, as both whale and barnacle. In her last ten years, she lived on me. She couldn’t help it; she wanted to stay alive, and I was her ride. Looking around at the faces of the people in my church, I could see their barnacles, too—all the usual old failures and sorrows, all the loss and ruckus of life that they have survived, excreted through the skin. Yet in Whale Rider, the barnacles are what the girl held on to like a saddle horn as she rode the whale. Without them, she couldn’t have climbed on.
I watched Sam listen to the choir, fidgety, but he seemed to listen on and off. I listen to his horrible music all the time, so he can listen to the music I love every two weeks. It is raw and exquisite and subversive—you can tell that the singers will not be moved, except by the Spirit; they will not be nipped and tugged at by stupid details and lies. They know who they are—who we all are, one family on this earth—and they sing with their heels dug in, like kids who trust enough to fall backward into someone’s arms.
After the song, the teens trudged off together, avoiding eye contact with the rest of us. They’re distrustful and spiky—life is weird and doesn’t deliver, and adults try to lead them like horses in the direction they think will make them happy, yet for the most part they won’t go. But the teenagers can’t make the congregation stop smiling at them; they can’t make them stop singing, or blessing them.
I was glad for Sam when he went off with his peers and the group leader after the Peace. The youth group is much less embarrassing. Of course he doesn’t want to come to regular worship—it’s so naked, built on the rubble of need and ruin, and our joy is deeply uncool—but he doesn’t want to floss or do homework either. He does not want to have any hard work, ever, but I can’t give him that without injuring him. It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.
He and his friends were in a good mood when church ended, but then we had to drop the friends off at their houses. They had things to do with their families, things they really did not want to do. Sam was bored and complaining when we got home. I made him lunch, and went to bed with the cat and the Church of The New York Times. When I woke up from a nap, I heard a commotion in the living room. Sam had gathered a dozen of his old stuffed animals and divided them into two warring camps—the bunnies versus the bears. The bunnies were inside a fortress of books, and a bear had been sent over the walls with an exercise-band catapult. There were great growling roars—very angry bunnies, bashing, wipe-outs, beloved old animals gone bad. It was a ferocious installation.
Sam let me watch. He called on his reserves of silliness to break through, and reconnect, with his embarrassment of a mother. Something made him willing to step off the storm-tossed rocks, scowling and sinking, and hold on to me, our home, his childhood, just as the Maori girl held on to the whale. What got her on the whale was her fierce understanding of her own truth, and that allowed her to tune into the whale’s spirit, as the whale was tuned into hers. But she couldn’t have held on without the barnacles on the whale’s back—the barnacles to which I have clung when I was trying something bold and outrageous and impossible, like being a writer, or helping my parents die with dignity, or learning to love my increasingly bodily body. My inner sense of disfigurement, the unfairness of the world, all the stumbling blocks, the breakups, the bad news, and the things I was made to endure that I hated, these were what grew the barnacles.
Sam has come through so many trials, and has already tested me to the limits of my faith and patience—without even having gotten his driver’s license yet. So while his current ride on earth is thrilling and important, what he has lived through and has been loved through is what helps him stay more or less balanced on the whale.
sixteen
one hand clapping
On Father’s Day two years ago, a bear of a man named Dwight, who does not have any children, spoke from the pulpit of my church about fatherhood. “I didn’t learn about a father’s love from my father,” he said. “I learned about a father’s love from my wife.”
She was sitting in the front row. You couldn’t miss her: she had only one hand.
This was a year after she and Dwight first started coming to our church, right after Anne had gone through treatment for breast cancer. She was brilliant, an activist and a passionate Christian, and I loved that she spoke from the heart about her own needs, and the world’s children, and the Bush crusade, without rehearsing—because you don’t have to rehearse the truth. But she seemed too intense, and I wondered if perhaps she was also a little cuckoo, which I suppose is not the politically correct word. Anne sometimes sounded like a mad Old Testament prophet, beseeching us to tend to the starving people of the world, to save the rain forests. (Remember the rain forests? Doesn’t that seem a long time ago, those stupid rain forests?)
She was so unabashed in her faithfulness and need that it made some people nervous. Maybe I’m more comfortable with a little bashed, as the world leaves you feeling so often. When she really got going, she made the rest of us seem positively staid. We’d be having a politely rousing service, until this emaciated, freckled figure with sparse baby-bird blond hair would start to rage against Bush. She’d cry out about the suffering in the Third World, and the evils of the military-industrial complex. She waved her stump for emphasis, or testimony. She waved it when she sang. She was like your craziest aunt, the religious one with funny eyes who drinks.
Her pale skin was pink and raw in places, as if someone had tried to erase some of the freckles too roughly.
I
nitially, I tried to keep my distance and make her understand that she and I were more church family than friends, but she did not seem to get it, or simply would not obey. She brought me Mary mementos and Jesusy things to carry with me when I traveled, and she called me sometimes to ask how Sam and I were. But then she’d go too far—twice she cornered me after services, badgering me to show up at KPFA, the great left-wing radio station in Berkeley, to pray outside its doors: for peace, for the poor, for the earth. She insisted that people would listen to me because I was a writer. I had a voice, and I should use it to get Jesus’ children cared for. I’ll rant, I told her, and I’ll get arrested, but I was not yet evolved enough to get down on my knees on the streets of Berkeley. I am just not a pray-at-KPFA kind of girl.
Once when I was heading out on a book tour, she foisted a heavy-hooded handmade monk’s robe on me, straight out of The Name of the Rose, and suggested I wear it onstage to declare my love for Christ, and to ward off evil. I hid it in a closet at home—I have enough trouble wearing certain colors onstage, let alone a robe and cowl.
Little by little, though, I let her into my heart. True, she was odd, but she was also courageous, and dear, kind, and feisty, and very tender toward the children at church. I started sitting next to her during worship, sharing a hymnal or a Bible, and calling her at home from time to time to ask how she was. One day, on the phone, I asked about the stump, and she told me the story: Her mother had been a chemist for the military in World War II, helping develop chemical weapons. Several of her colleagues had also given birth to children with defects; her mother couldn’t cope with Anne’s. She was disgusted by the stump, and always positioned Anne so that it didn’t show in family pictures.
Anne called it her paw.
One Sunday last year, during the Prayers of the People, Anne announced that her cancer had returned; she’d been given only a few months to live. She and Dwight had decided against any more chemo: they would trust God’s grace and love to see her through.
She grew weaker and more emaciated, but when she could make it to church, she spoke and praised with more urgency, more need, and more gratitude for God’s constant presence and mercy.
As the cancer progressed, she needed stronger pain medicine, and consequently her prayers grew longer and loopier. Her message was always the same, though: God loved the world, all evidence to the contrary, and we must not give up on God. The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness had not overcome it. She had Dwight, a cat, Jesus, and the members of our church, and very little scared her. She was a true believer.
I asked her to talk to my kids in church school about her faith, and one Sunday she came. The kids ranged in age from five years old to twelve. They all knew she was very sick. She asked each of them their names, and then whether they had noticed anything unusual about her. There was a polite silence. The children shook their heads with burlesque puzzled looks, until one kid all but smote his forehead, and said, “Oh! You mean the hand!” She nodded.
She let them examine the stump, up close. “Wow,” said another kid. “Whatcha got there?”
She showed them the scar tissue where she’d had surgery as a baby to remove tiny vestigial fingers. The kids studied it with the fearless attention with which they might have examined a huge potato bug. She told them her story, of her mother’s job as a military chemist, of the family pictures where other people’s bodies hid her hand. How she learned to pass as normal, as whole, to do so many amazing things that it took the attention off her body. “I was a good student, a terrific pianist. And such a good girl. But I was very lonely. My mother found me disgusting. And only a few people over the years wanted to hold my hand.”
The children couldn’t take their eyes off her, the weightless body, the strange paw. “The offer was that if I shared my mother’s opinion of me, I got her. Otherwise I was totally alone. Until one day, Jesus came into the great emptiness.”
It happened when Anne was six or so. She was sitting on her rocking chair in her bedroom, when she suddenly noticed a baby’s face in the scar tissue. She wrapped the end of her arm in a scarf, swaddling it, so only the features in the scar tissue showed. “It looked like a doll,” she told the children. “And it was looking at me very, very gently.”
She invited the children to come close again and see the baby, which they all could make out, once they knew what to look for. “It was me,” she said. “Both children were me. The six-year-old who was doing the mothering and the baby were both me. And I felt Jesus looking up at me, from inside the baby. And he was saying, ‘I’m sorry it turned out this way, but you are whole in my eyes.’ So I got me back, and in Jesus, I found a real mother.”
“And how are you now?” I asked.
“I’m getting weak. Soon I’ll be like a little child. I won’t be able to walk, and I’ll be totally dependent. But Dwight has promised to take care of me every step of the way. So at last I’m getting to have the earthly experience of being a small, cherished child.”
“Did you mind having only one hand?” a girl asked.
“I didn’t like it at all. It’s been harrowing. And there are many things I love to do that I can’t do well. I love making furniture, but it’s too hard. I know there are other one-handed people who would hold the nails in their mouth and nail away, but I just can’t do it. My lips would get bruised. And this one hand is always exhausted and banged up.
“Having this paw made me notice how much suffering there is in the world. It makes me ask, ‘What’s that suffering about? What’s the answer?’ The suffering itself means nothing. But the answer is also that I can’t look away from it. I saw that God wanted me to help relieve the suffering. And that work has given me peace.”
Anne came to church not long before she died. She asked us to pray for Dwight and her as her life ended. They both were teary but calm.
Dwight called me a few days later. Anne needed a favor. She had asked the funeral home to deliver the box in which her body would be carried away for cremation, so she could get comfortable with this last piece of her death, but it made her terribly afraid. She wanted the children from the church to decorate it for her.
This, of course, would have been too frightening for them, so we asked the parents’ permission, and when the kids came to church the next Sunday, we commissioned several dozen paintings. The kids painted angels, and bridges to heaven, and cats waiting for Anne on the other side. The little ones made hearts, and stick figures of Jesus, cats, and Power Rangers; the older ones wrote messages beside their drawings, telling Anne not to be afraid. The next day some of us grown-ups from church drove to her house in the woods to paste the art onto her casket. She was still alive, but barely, in a child-size nightie, sitting up in her bed in a room surrounded by trees, filled with sun. We would take turns sitting on the bed with her, singing, praying out loud. She was as stripped down to nothing as you can be while still breathing, like a plant, or a yogi, barely able to open her eyes, but she smiled a few times. Dwight spent most of the time on the porch with the casket crew, pasting pictures, filling the empty spaces with calendar art, until the casket had been transformed into a gift box.
We had a memorial service for Anne on a Sunday soon after she died. We began with her favorite hymn, “Approach, My Soul, the Mercy Seat.” Then Veronica spoke. She was exhausted from the morning service and her early-afternoon pastoral visits, but she reached into the empty well of herself and was visibly revived by the giving. She said that faith is not about how we feel; it is about how we live. And Anne lived her own eulogy, gardening, praising God, fighting the great good fight for justice, loving Dwight, playing piano, doing her yoga. Anne believed, without wavering. You don’t run into such faithfulness often, faith in the goodness of the world.
A woman named Ranola got ready to sing a solo in the last hymn, “Near the Cross.” She took a deep breath as she sat waiting, her eyes closed, with an air of quiet intensity. When Ranola opens her mouth to sing, she becomes a channel, raw and plain. The
notes come from the Lord, who sings inside her. She opens her mouth and lets the Lord out. It’s like calling from the mountains. When the choir rose, Ranola rose with them, her eyes still closed, and they all began to sway. You felt she could wait forever to begin. I looked off for a moment to the altar. There were vases of funeral flowers everywhere, gorgeous, purple-black, faded like daguerreotypes, flowers on their way to somewhere else, passing from one substance to another.
seventeen
loving your president: day 2
Thank God for the fall. Summer nearly does me in every year. It’s too hot, and the light is unforgiving, and the days go on way too long. And this year, the war on Iraq was raging. I felt soul-sick this summer to discover the secret gladness in me that the war was going so badly. I hated it about myself. I felt addicted to the energy of scorning my president. I thought that if people like me stopped hating him, it would mean that he had won.
Then summer turned to autumn.
I headed out for church one Sunday filled with my usual mix of joy and profound anxiety about life. But church is my favorite place on earth, after the couch in my living room. In church, we don’t live from our minds—we live in community, which is to say, in shared loss and hope, singing, hanging out together. We don’t sit huddled together, thinking.
I talked to more than one person before the service began, about the snap in the air. Everyone seemed glad summer was over. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season—too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky, and there are fresh winds, and misty salmon sunrises, and then cool blue skies. The weather is lighter, marbled, and it makes you feel like striding again, makes you glad that so much works at all.